Good news and bad news. The good news is that things are moving at very quick pace. Believe it or not, all infrastructure pipe has been laid on Route 35 and the State DOT and contractors hope to have it up and running next week. The bad news is that due to repaving, Route 35 still needs to be closed until further notice. For those of you that live on North of the Ocean/35 you are going to have to continue to park in your neighbor’s driveways on East and Barnegat. In addition, we need to close the Mantoloking side of the bridge for overnight sewer/water work on Sunday only. On Sunday, the Southern part of town will be open only from 8:00 to 3:00pm.

We also had a good meeting today with the FEMA debris folks. They are committed to helping us find a way to clean up our beaches and our waterways. They are dedicating full time resources to help us out.

As mentioned at the council meeting, residents have a expressed a concern about price gauging during remediation. The NJ Attorney General’s office is handling all consumer complaints. If you have a complaint, you can go to The Attorney General’s Office of Consumer Affairs’ website and fill out the form: http://www.nj.gov/oag/ca/complaint/ocp.pdf

This one is really important– we are having a huge problem with debris. Both of our sites in Brick and Bay Head are over-capacity and will close down for our debris in the immediate future. These sites are temporary and used as staging areas before transferring the debris to the primary land-fill. We need areas in town to stage this debris– if we do not have place to store debris we will have to stop all debris collection/work on residences in town. If you are interested in lending your land to the Borough as a temporary staging area, it would be much appreciated. Please contact the Borough Hall if you are interested.

Finally, it looks like we will be having a Christmas Tree lighting ceremony on Sunday, December 16. We will invite all of the construction crews that have helped us rebuild and do something special. Barlow’s from Sea Girt has agreed to supply the tree and we will place it at the base of the bridge. Please stay tuned to the website for details.